Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg review – a quiet novel of devastating power

This Booker-nominated fiction debut asks how anybody can survive the loss of all their loved ones

In the world of serious literary fiction, the conflation of bleakness and profundity means that too often the novels declared the most important are those that plumb new depths of human cruelty and suffering. Two of the 13 books on this year’s Man Booker prize longlist explore the trauma of childhood abuse, a third a savagely dystopian London, but it is their fellow nominee Bill Clegg’s debut novel that would appear at first sight to blow his competition for grimmest subject matter out of the water.

Did You Ever Have a Family opens on a summer morning, the morning of June Reid’s daughter’s wedding. Except that in the early hours a gas leak at June’s house has caused an explosion. The fire that follows kills her whole family, not only her daughter Lolly and William, Lolly’s fiance, but also her boyfriend, Luke, and her ex-husband Adam. Only June survives. In a single stroke she has lost everyone she loves. The loss, as she herself numbly acknowledges, is obscene. It is left to a gossiping neighbour in a local coffee shop to put the question June herself cannot begin to ask, let alone answer: “How do you recover from that? How would you even begin?”

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